If you can believe it, that was Old Town Suds' first booth space ever. We've come a long way since our borrowed card table and dining table tablecloth that was a wedding gift. I like looking back because you can learn a lot from your first booth space.

You know you have the guts to get out there and put your wares on display. It takes a LOT of guts to open yourself up to the people in your community.

You begin to learn what works and what doesn't for your products. Pretty soon, I was expanding to 6' long tables and maxing out the capacity of our old sedan.

You start seeing your product and space from a buyer's perspective. For me, this was the hardest step to fully understand. It takes time to find the right display pieces and the ones that fit your brand. Many, many, many trips to Home Goods later, I finally have a nice stock of display pieces that I can use - regardless of my booth space or size.

There is one thing that has never changed from my booth setup.

I bet you are surprised to read that. Take a look at the photo again.

Any quick guesses to what hasn't changed?

It's my newsletter signup sheet. That clipboard and it's army of card stock collects names and contact information at every event we do. It has never changed (except for the few times I try to use my iPad to collect signups).

After reading this, I don't want fast food ever again. It was the bacteria matter on the soda machine that put me over the top. I knew about the calorie content and the mark-up; that is to be expected. But the bacteria and lack of hand washing is just gross.

Incase you are wondering, we are getting iPads. We are holding out for the first release to see if we really do want the 3g version. I think we are both going to hold out for the option of having internet on metro.

It integrates Twitter accounts into your website. When users click a link, they can follow your writer, see her latest tweet, etc on your site. This information is provided by small modal overlay popups. This is an obvious value-add for content/media websites. Twitter is launching with 10,000 sites including NY Times, Huffington Post

When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere. Twitter will be part of our favorite sites!

When we're ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

Later in the interview, Evan was asked what he thought about his company, with regards for openness. Evan responded by saying that they had a lot of discussions at Twitter of whether to use the word 'open' or 'transparency'. His conclusion was that, "A window is transparent but a door is open." He said that they always try to proceed down the road of openness. We have of course seen this with how 3rd party developers are able to use the versatile Twitter API to use twitter in many ways, from 3rd party apps to social media mashups with other services, such as Foursquare or Gowalla.

After days, 2, 3, & 4 in the apartment I was hoping for a glimmer of light & we would be able to leave. Do something. Anything other than being cooped up inside. Even with the blizzard, I decided to try to venture out. 4 pairs of pants, 3 tops, & a wool sweater were under the puffy down coat. This is what I saw on my 5 minutes outside of our apartment:

We decided to trek through our neighborhood now that the snow as stopped. The Carlyle neighborhood has done a great job with the sidewalks because most are completely clear. Here is a shot that Joel took on our walk.

As my photos and videos are processed I will add them to this post. Stay safe and warm! Remember, we get part 3 on Tuesday night.

I work with young professional leaders every day. Every day I see how we can shape the future with just a little effort. I am lucky in that this industry has a culture of women leaders, most industries, let alone countries, are not as fortunate. In my volunteer position, I am helping women climb up the ladder in Washington that may not have had the opportunity before now. This is why this project speaks to me. Imagine what we could do with just a little more hard work.

Last evening @girlfuturist posted a link to The Girl Effect. Imagine if we helped the women in the 3rd world nations. What could we as women in a first world nation help them achieve!?!